RIM Director: Outsiders are morons, critics can get bent

The Globe and Mail posted an article on RIM and Roger Martin on Saturday, titled Roger Martin: Defying RIM’s critics. The article attempts to get an inside-track on what’s happening at RIM today, and how the resignation of co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis is affecting the company, and the state of pundit-critics who just don’t get it.

If the article does nothing else, it very articulately illustrates the psychological hurdles the company faces moving forward with its upper-management types while it attempts to rebuild its brand and image that it has so elegantly dismantled on its own over the last five years. In short, outsiders are morons, critics can get bent, and RIM’s great.

RIM’s Roger Martin, speaking to The Globe and Mail:

[quote]“I laugh at the vast majority of critics when they say ‘Oh, you should have made this CEO transition, like, four years ago.’ Yeah, right – like, to who…So we’re supposed to hand it over to children, or morons from the outside who will destroy the company?” he says. “Or should we try to build our way to having succession?[/quote]

If there was ever an example of a company failing to look at what’s going on outside of its doors, it appears that RIM may just be the prime candidate leading the cause. Instead of focusing on what the company needs to do moving forward, Martin seems more interested in comparing and contrasting the decisions made at Apple in the mid-80s and RIM’s situation today, and when that failed, he decided to try to throw the iPhone under the bus with half spoken truths:

[quote]People were saying we can’t make powerful phones like Apple. Yes, we can, but we couldn’t believe consumers would put up with that kind of battery inefficiency and that kind of network inefficiency.[/quote]

A director that can’t understand what the public actually needs and wants is a recipe for disaster, and it’s pretty obvious from Martin’s comments that the top-dawgs at RIM still haven’t the slightest clue why the iPhone is successful and the BlackBerry is quickly becoming an anachronism in 2012. It comes down to one thing — evolution — which is something RIM has very little experience with it seems.

Oh, it gets better:

[quote]They ask ‘Why can’t you be more like Apple?’ So we should go bankrupt and fire our founders and bring in a moron? That’s what we should do?…So that is what the geniuses who have all these clever thoughts about business models are saying – and a big piece of me just laughs: Have you no memory? Do you not even think?[/quote]

That’s right, RIM, your customers and fans want you to be more like the Apple that almost burnt completely out in the 80s and 90s. They couldn’t be referring to innovation and driving the market instead of sitting in the passenger seat. They’re just plebs, one of the ” morons from the outside who will destroy the company.” They have no insights, and no valuable ideas about how you should turn that company around. After all, how could they know anything when they don’t work at RIM.

If you’re hoping things will get better at RIM, don’t hold your breath. Until Thorsten Heins has time to send out a memo instructing management, board members, and directors that they should not be spouting off in the press, the hole RIM is digging will continue to get deeper.